There’s a lesson that South African companies keep having to relearn the hard way: European regulators play by different rules. And they play for keeps. FirstRand – one of South Africa’s finest financial institutions, and a company that has spent years carefully building a presence in the UK consumer finance market – has just been handed a bill so large that it has decided to walk away entirely.
Read MoreMarch 2026 is a month South African investors will not forget in a hurry. In just 31 days, the JSE shed more than R3.4 trillion in market value. That’s the worst monthly destruction of wealth on our stock exchange since the 2008 global financial crisis.
To put that number in context: at the start of February, South Africa’s listed equities had reached a record high of R26.6 trillion.
For the past decade, coal has been the fuel the world was trying to forget.
Climate agreements, green energy targets, ESG mandates, net-zero pledges — the entire direction of global energy policy pointed one way: away from coal.
It’s one of the most confusing things happening in markets right now. There’s a war raging in the Middle East. Oil prices are surging. Inflation fears are climbing. Global markets are rattled. And gold – the asset people have run to in every crisis for thousands of years – is falling?
Read MoreOver the past weeks, I’ve spoken about the Strait of Hormuz and how the war is threatening oil and aluminium supply. But there’s another, less obvious story unfolding – one that could ripple through global food prices, farming economics, and agricultural stocks. That is a significant share of the world’s key fertilizer ingredients flows through this chokepoint: roughly 44% of global sulphur, 31% of urea, 18% of ammonia, and 15% of phosphates.
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